Effectiveness of Digital and Social Media Marketing Analytics in Asia

This dissertation explores the effectiveness of digital and social media marketing analytics in streamlining marketing campaigns in Asia. It covers the advantages of using digital marketing in Asia, social media measurement, and consumer empowerment. It also discusses ethical issues that arise due to the use of social media marketing analytics. The subject is relevant to any course related to marketing, business, or technology. The course code, name, and college/university are not mentioned.

The effectiveness of Digital and social media marketing analytics in
streamlining marketing campaigns in Asia
By
(Student Number: 000000000)
A dissertation submitted for the Masters in [insert programme title]
The Business School
University of Roehampton
2017

Table of Contents
Executive Summary.........................................................................................................................2
Introduction and context..................................................................................................................3
Research objective(s)...................................................................................................................4
Literature Review............................................................................................................................5
Digital and Social media analytics...............................................................................................5
Social Media Measurement..........................................................................................................6
Social Media & Consumer Empowerment..................................................................................7
Advantages of using Digital marketing in Asia...........................................................................8
Research Methodology..................................................................................................................11
Ethical Issues in the use of digital and social media Analytics.....................................................11
Time Plan and Resources...............................................................................................................14
Conclusions and Recommendations..............................................................................................15
Bibliography..................................................................................................................................16
Appendix........................................................................................................................................19
1

Executive Summary
Digital and Social media analytics refers to the process of analyzing, interpreting and
measuring the various associations and interactions between topics, ideas, and people. It is a
powerful tool that organizations can use for purposes of uncovering the different sentiments of
their customers, from the many online social platforms that exist. Social media companies such
as facebook, twitter, Instagram, have billions of users, and this makes it very attractive to
companies. This is because they would need to market their products to the users of these
accounts. For example, social media companies such as Facebook has over 500, million users,
and this makes it highly attractive to multinational companies, mainly because it gives them
access to these people for marketing purposes.
2

Introduction and context
Since its proliferation into the current world, social media has earned several definitions.
In an ideal world nevertheless, social media refers to common online communication channels,
which are dedicated to input from specific communities notably for collaboration, interaction and
content sharing. In many situations, social media platforms customarily comprise websites,
forums, applications as well as social networking sites. Similarly, social media encompasses
social curation; wikis and microblogging. Some prominent examples of social media include
Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit and Pinterest. Other noticeable social media platforms
include Google Corporation’s Google+ and Wikipedia, which usually serves as a reference site
(Bond, Merolli, & Ahmed, 2016).
Social media is no doubt becoming an integral part of human lives. They have been
celebrated for the fact that they enhance communication between individuals, hence making
interaction much more comfortable. The role of social media in marketing has also been
applauded as stakeholders have argued that it is the next big thing in marketing. Social media
platforms increase both brand recognition and loyalty while at the same time reducing the cost of
marketing. Experts have also attested to the fact that it improves customer experience (Elstad,
2016). The research focusses on the various uses of digital and social media analytics such as in
marketing, ethical issues that arise due to the use of digital and social media analytics and how
best.
Wertime & Fenwick (2011) defined digital marketing as future evolution in the field of
marketing when companies will execute most of their marketing activities through digital
channels and online mediums. Digital marketing activities are being incorporated through digital
channels that are interactive in nature and provide opportunity to companies to execute
3

personalized dialogue with customers. As like neural network, personalized dialogue creates
multiple data points and behavioural information of customers. In such context, digital markets
can use data points and behavioural information of customers to continuously improvise and
optimize interaction with customers (Wertime & Fenwick, 2011). They pointed out that digital
marketing are being executed through variety of channels like social media pages of Facebook,
Hi5, Twitter, LinkedIn or through web blogging or interactive games in web browsers like
Google, Firefox etc. or through YouTube videos. Montgomery & Chester (2011) stated that
target customers for digital marketers mainly lie in the age group of 12 years to 32 years. In other
words, it can be said that digital marketers target mainly children, teenagers, adolescent, and
students, young working professionals who spend significant amount of time in web browsing or
social networking. Montgomery & Chester (2011) found that digital marketers have significant
amount of scope to use online gaming or augmented reality console in virtual environment as
digital marketing platform to promote the brand to thousands of online gamers. On the other
hand, they stated that mobile marketing or developing promotional application in Smartphone
can be termed as augmented online marketing strategy.
Research objective(s)
(i) What is the effectiveness of digital and social media marketing analytics in
streamlining marketing campaigns in Asia?
(ii) What are the ethical issues that arise due to the use of social media marketing
analytics?
4

Literature Review
Digital and Social media analytics
Digital and social media analytics can be referred to as online listening or even social
media listening. This is because it allows marketers to have the capability of identifying the
trends, and needs of customers, for purposes of developing products that would satisfy and meet
these needs. There are significant evidence and examples whereby companies have used the tool
of digital and social media analytics to market their products, and engage with their customers
(Gonçalves, 2017a). Companies such as Royal Bank of Canada, Jet Blue, Whirlpool and
Barclays Bank are known to be using the tools of the digital and social media analytics for
purposes of marketing, and promoting their brand image (Kelsey, 2017).
These companies have managed to improve their services, because of the feedback that
they usually receive from their customers, through social media. This is because social media is
an interactive tool of communication. Furthermore, scholars and academicians have tried to
analyze and explain the seasonal emotional pattern that is always characterized by the use of
social media (Minazzi, 2014a). This is important because this type of research has enabled
companies to know the reason why people use the social media and the best marketing tools to
use, for purposes of convincing them to use the products of the company. Through these studies,
researchers have managed to come up with social media tools that can enable them to study the
emotions of customers, regarding a particular product or substance (Heinonen, 2011). For
example, the University of Bristol was able to develop a digital and social media analytics tool
referred to as the Mood of the Nation
5

This tool had the capability of extracting emotions such as fear, anger, sadness, joy, hate
from the twitter accounts, of users who are located in the United Kingdom. Such kind of
information is essential to a company, and this is mainly because a company would know how its
marketing campaigns are received by the target audience(Gonçalves, 2017b). A marketing
advertisement or campaign that manages to elicit a lot of negative emotion in the social media
would mean that it has failed, and the company under consideration would be forced to change
strategies, and initiate a new marketing campaign. On the other hand, a marketing campaign that
achieves a lot of positive emotions would mean that it is successful, and hence it should continue
with the advertisement or the marketing campaign. These types of technologies and social media
tools have the capability of affecting the privacy of individuals (Minazzi, 2014a).
Social Media Measurement
The measurement of social media has been stated to relate to the actuality of trailing the
diverse and assorted content associated with the various types of social media on the whole. This
particular process is observed to be carried out for ascertaining the specific quantity and attitude
and reaction about a specific brand regarding the social media by the concerned marketers
(Deshpande, 2018). Social media is being increasingly considered to be a popular form of a
marketing platform for marketers owing to which the facet of measurement is supposed to be
quite a decisive constituent to attain success (Minazzi, 2014b). This particular aspect of
measuring or instead gauging the social media has been mentioned to be quite unripe as the
concept of Web analytics during the period of the 1990s. Considerable popularity towards the
usage of the Internet was recorded during 1990 among individuals. The Internet was started
being used as a social medium for various purposes which called for the requirement of web
analytics. This particular notion has been stated to be related to measurement, evaluation,
6

compilation and providing details about the internet statistics with the intention to comprehend
and to optimize the degree of usage associated with the web (Sheth, 2018).
Social Media & Consumer Empowerment
Social media is learned to change the dynamics of modern consumer behavior
completely. It has become amongst the most dynamic tool for consumers to voice their opinion
about anything on earth be it a political issue, a film review, recent brand launch, and the latest
trends. It has been phenomenal in empowering consumers since they can openly share their
respective opinion about various brands and directly become a part of the success or failure of a
brand. Contrary to the time when consumers relied on feedback from their close and near ones
to get feedback about a brand, social media has helped the consumer get a global perspective
about a particular brand (Gonçalves, 2017c).
Consumers express their opinion in the form of retweets and likes. The voice of the
consumers has never been given such importance by brands before. The companies regularly
keep tracking the blogs, posts, and tweet of consumers so that they can position their brands
according to the consumer tastes and thus lead the competition (Yuksel, Milne, & Miller, 2016).
Brands have grown to be increasingly aware of the impact that social media could have
on its success or failure and accordingly try to woo the consumers with the best they can offer.
For example, the “LG- Find Your Bliss” campaign was successful in creating 80000 fans in the
fan page about FaceBook, was published in more than 100 blogs and was tweeted more than 75
times in a time span of merely four weeks (Gonçalves, 2017d).
Social media has aided consumers’ voice to reach to their desired targets. Although
consumers had a voice, social media has assisted it to become louder and spread quicker than
7

before. Brands have always had time to react to consumer complaints, but with social media
becoming more powerful every day, brands don’t have the time to waste. They have to work on
their offering and live up to their promise every moment to delight their target consumers. Before
the advent of social media, consumers never had the option of expressing their opinion in public
and reach a wide target in a very short span of time. However, nowadays it does not take much
of a time for a consumer to express his satisfaction or dissatisfaction to a considerable number of
audiences irrespective of whether his peers are known or unknown (Gonçalves, 2017e).
Consumers can freely share their opinion even with acquaintances, strangers and a diverse group
in a reasonably comfortable manner. The purchasing behavior of consumers depends on tweets,
feedbacks, and posts in social media channels rather than promotions done by brands in channels
of conventional media.
In today’s world of consumer empowerment marketers are left with little choice other
than changing conventional approach to transformational approach. The long-established push
system of marketing is a passé. Transformational marketing means using modern tools to
comprehend the outlook consumers share about the brands and accordingly design consumer-
focused marketing strategies to lead in the competition (Gonçalves, 2017e).
Advantages of using Digital marketing in Asia
With the growth of digital marketing as an alternative to the traditional marketing
approach, a number of channels have been developed that have enhanced the presence of
companies online. These include the use of search engine optimization, the pay per click among
other channels that have been developed to improve either the presence of an organization’s
digital website or the description of its products.
8

The increased use of digital forums as a way of marketing as compared to the traditional
approaches has been associated with the advantages it provides to the users. With digital
marketing, the playground is leveled and all businesses, irrespective of their size, market
capitalization or government support can perform equally. This provides an opportunity for
emerging businesses to increase their presence in the market despite the tough competition. As
opposed to traditional advertising approaches where big multinationals control the airtime on
national televisions and advertising channels, digital marketing is only influenced by the
approach adopted by the marketer (Deshpande, 2018).
The overall cost of advertising using this approach is relatively lower as compared to
other traditional approaches and this increases its preference among emerging businesses. The
cost of digital advertising is only affected by the level of contents that are required and the
surcharges by the web developer. Traditional advertising methods can only be measured based
on the level of increase in the sales in a given year. This can be falsely pegged on the marketing
approaches despite the fact that other factors can also increase the sales apart from the
advertising approaches. With digital marketing however, the response and the results of the
initiatives can be measured real time based on the online response of the clients and the high
number of positive reviews received.
The level of exposure with digital marketing is also high as compared to other approaches
that have been traditionally used, as the number of online visitors remains high in the country.
Once a key is optimized, any search that has the key will increase the traffic into the website and
this increases the likelihood that the product advertised will reach the target market. Digital
advertising can also go viral due to the current web 2.0 features which allow online contents to
be shared in different social media sites such as Facebook and twitter (Lober & Flowers, 2011).
9

Differences between traditional and digital marketing approaches
Traditional and digital marketing approaches differ considerably and this explains the
current preference for the later among organizations across the world. While traditional
advertising is one way, digital advertising provides a two-way communication medium in which
the advertiser can interact with the target market and get the feedback concerning the product.
Digital marketing is also a closed system of reaching the market while the traditional is closed
and involves the communication from the business only. Traditional advertising is opaque and
does not provide room for consumers to improve their knowledge about the product while digital
marketing is transparent and more involving. Digital marketing is a one on one marketing
approach where one client is approached and attracted at a time. This differs from the traditional
approach in which the mass is targeted and communication is generalized to meet the needs of
the entire market without consideration for the variation in the tastes and preferences (Lober &
Flowers, 2011).
Due to the scrutiny that digital advertising is exposed to the contents are more authentic
and actual as the clients can rebuff polished information as presented in the traditional
approaches. In digital advertising, the main participants or the channel of passing the information
are the users of the sites. However, traditional approaches use celebrities and actors to influence
the buying habits of the general population. The communication in digital marketing is also
unstructured, which makes it more informal as compared to the structured approach adopted in
traditional advertising. Based on this comparison, it is evident that traditional approach is more
reliant on the lack of information of the target market. However, digital advertising appreciates
the level of enlighten of the target market and thus presents information to attract and not lure the
customers.
10

11

Research Methodology
This research shall review peer-reviewed articles and journals on the effectiveness of
digital and social media marketing analytics in streamlining marketing campaigns in Asia. A
literature search would first be carried out via an internet search using the following search
words and similar combinations of these words: effectiveness of digital and social media
marketing analytics, social media marketing analytics, ethical issues in the use of social media
analytics. Relevant studies shall be set aside for further analysis. Studies carried out in the last
ten years shall be included in this topic, and shall mostly cover social media marketing analytics.
Studies which cover other forms of analytics (i.e., big data analytics and data analytics) will not
be included in this research. Only peer-reviewed articles carried out by credible authors will be
involved in the study.
Ethical Issues in the use of digital and social media
Analytics
Privacy is a matter of concern to every people, and this is because it any breaches to it,
can compromise the security and well-being of an individual. For example, with the development
of Facebook, and the continued increase in the popularity of MySpace, majority of people, all
over the world are providing their personal information through the internet (Lober & Flowers,
2011). However, most of these users do not have the knowledge that they can modify the settings
of their accounts for purposes of ensuring that the personal information they provide is not given
to the public. This, therefore, means that the privacy concerns of people, about digital and social
media analytics, is unfounded. This is because users of social media sites have the capability of
12

controlling the kind of information they receive or use, in their social media sites. However,
(Karas, 2013) believes that this is not the case.
In the view of (Stewart & Coleman, 2013), administrators of the social media sites have
the overall control of the accounts of users. This is because they are in business, and the desire to
ensure that large organizations can use their sites for marketing purposes. Furthermore, for
purposes of identifying the location of its users, companies such as Facebook, Twitter and
MySpace have introduced applications aimed at tracking and determining the location of its
users. This kind of information is beneficial to companies, and this is because they would know
the geographical location of their users, hence develop appropriate marketing techniques or tools,
that would have the capability of appealing to people within these geographic locations.
Furthermore, it would save the company some money, because it won’t advertise or engage in
marketing promotions, in regions where it offices or products are not available (Lober &
Flowers, 2011).
However, these applications that identify the locations of social media users is
controversial, and it has implications on the role of internet privacy, as overlapping on the need
of providing security to the users of these social media sites (Bond, Merolli, & Ahmed, 2016).
For examples, some of these social media applications are aimed at cyberstalking. An example is
an application known as Creepy. This application has the capability of tracking the location of an
individual by using photos that are uploaded to Flickr or Twitter. For example, when an
individual uploads photos to their social networking sites, marketers can track their recent
locations. Furthermore, some smartphones have the capability of embedding the latitude and
longitude coordinate into photos, hence automatically sending this type of information to the
13

Creepy application. Anybody using this type of application can search the specific person, and
find out their locations (Sharma, 2016).
This creates a variety of risks to the users of the application, specifically to those sharing
their information with a large group of people, or followers. The security of these people is at
risk, and this is because of the identity of their locations. However, to marketers, this is
beneficial. This is because they would have the capability of identifying the location of their
customers, and hence come up with marketing campaigns, that are effective in appealing to the
needs of their customers. Furthermore, developing a marketing campaign that does not factor in
the location of its target audience would generally lead to the failure of the campaign under
consideration. Therefore, such kinds of information are always useful to marketers (Khan, 2017).
Furthermore, the use of digital and social media analytics helps an organization to listen and
learn from its customers. This information is beneficial to marketers because they would develop
a marketing campaign aimed at satisfying the identified needs.
14

Time Plan and Resources
Below is the Gantt chart indicating the main tasks to be carried out, their duration and both start
and end dates.
ID Task Name Start Finish Duration Complete 5/14/2018 6/1/2018 7/1/2018 8/1/2018
5/14/2018 5/20/2018 5/27/2018 6/3/2018 6/10/2018 6/17/2018 6/24/2018 7/1/2018 7/8/2018 7/15/2018 7/22/2018 7/29/2018 8/5/20188/12/2018
1 Pilot Study of Chosen Research Methodologies 5/11/2018 5/18/2018 6.0 d. 0%
2 Administer 5 pilot surveys 5/11/2018 5/16/2018 4.0 d. 0%
3 Amend survey for any improvements suggested from the pilot surveys 5/16/2018 5/18/2018 3.0 d. 0%
4 Execute Chosen Research Methodologies 5/18/2018 6/18/2018 22.0 d. 0%
5 Administer surveys via an online web link 5/18/2018 6/18/2018 22.0 d. 0%
6 Analysis of results gathered from surveys 6/18/2018 7/2/2018 11.0 d. 0%
7 Documentation 7/2/2018 8/31/2018 45.0 d. 0%
8 Write up a critical evaluation 7/2/2018 8/2/2018 24.0 d. 0%
9 Write up final report on the overall research topic and project 8/2/2018 8/31/2018 22.0 d. 0%
15

Conclusions and Recommendations
Asia, just like any other region of the world can benefit immensely on the use of digital
marketing. (Bond, Merolli, & Ahmed, 2016) Explains that the use of digital and social media
analytics in marketing helps in improving innovation. These tools of the social media usually
help in providing a deep natural language or semantic analysis of the social media. It is possible
to configure these tools to discover the various gaps in the industry as a whole. Innovation would
emanate, based on the information provided by users of social media, concerning a particular
product. The social media comprises of a lot of information about the portfolio of a company.
Effective implementation of the tools of digital and social media analytics helps an organization
to mine this information, which would, in turn, help it to improve the existing services and
products (Heinonen, 2011).
In conclusion, digital and social media analytics plays a significant role in ensuring that
an organization manages to get the necessary information that can be used in advancing its
interest and objectives. Social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter have millions of users,
and these people regularly comment on the quality of products or services that an organization
offers. It is this kind of information that companies can mine, and use them for marketing of their
products and services. However, the use of social media analytic tools frequently compromises
the security and privacy of an individual. This is risky, because the safety of the person under
consideration may be at risk, or vulnerable. However, to business organization, social media
analytics is a vital marketing process, that can help them recover information that can be used to
promote their business.
16

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Appendix
Time plan
20